Certainty.

The clean, final certainty of a woman who has just been told, out loud, that the people who were supposed to love her children had been waiting the whole time for better ones.

” “What I felt then was not jealousy.

I want to be precise about it, because it surprised me.

It was shame — a deep, aching shame, not for myself, but for my daughters.

Because the thing my husband had just called at last was the thing that made my two girls, sitting at that moment in an airport across the city, into a kind of long wait for the real answer.